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During
the summer break, we offer our readers a retrospective glaze on Stéphane
Lissner’s first season at the Paris Opera. Singers, stage directors, stage designers…
The season 15/16 hosted the debuts at the Paris Opera of numerous acclaimed
artists. Looking back on a season-manifesto.

And Folly took over the Palais Garnier…

This
production of Platée directed by
Laurent Pelly must be a timeless classic: season after season, it conveys an
ever renewed pleasure. Furthermore, it still succeeds to surprise us and make
us burst into laughter. One must admit that this time, the show could rely on
the presence of Julie Fuchs, soprano of
a rising generation,
who was making her debut at the Paris Opera and enchanted the audience with her
interpretation of La Folie.

And Romeo Castellucci confronted himself with Moses und Aron…

The
inaugural event of this season unquestionably was Arnold Schönberg’s Moses und Aron given for the first time
at the Opera Bastille. Stage director, creator of shows for theatre and opera
that are as many visual shocks, the Italian Romeo Castellucci confronted himself to this biblical tale about
a people’s wandering and the limits of speech. The term “confrontation” isn’t
an overstatement when considered the importance of image in Castellucci’s
aesthetic, importance that is precisely questioned by Schönberg in his opera.
From this dialectical opposition between a major contemporary artist and one of
the 20th century’s most fascinating works emerged a memorable
artistic gesture, an aesthetic manifesto : on the vast stage of the Opera
Bastille, a desert stretched itself out – firstly
white then painted black– until ironing out the chorus, while
Schönberg’s notes resounded relentlessly.

And Barbara Hannigan set fire to La Voix humaine…

Another
high point of the season was the dual evening bringing together Béla Bartók’s Le
Château de Barbe-Bleue and Francis Poulenc’s La Voix humaine in a production by Krzysztof Warlikowski. This wasn’t the Polish stage
director’s first experiment at the Paris Opera. Among his various productions,
one remembers Iphigénie en Tauride (which will be revived next season) L’Affaire Makropoulos or LeRoi Roger… For his anticipated
comeback, he attempted creating close dramaturgical links between Bartók’s
opera and Poulenc’ lyrical tragedy. The result of this double bill is a strange
and fascinating theatrical and musical object, an intense experience for the
audience. Under the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Canadian soprano Barbara Hanniganmade her Paris Opera debut
and offered an incandescent performance in the role of La Voix humaine’s passionate and suicidal lover: she literarily
self-consumes on stage with a fire that doesn’t burn out until Poulenc’s last
chords.

And Faust left the Earth for Mars…

For his Paris Opera debut, Latvian stage director Alvis Hermanis took over the myth of Faust and turned it into a very contemporary re-envisioning: basing himself upon the “Mars One” project which intends to colonize the planet Mars, seeing in cosmologist Stephen Hawking the scholar’s rightful heir, he imaged a production where the pact between the scholar and the Devil becomes a one-way ticket to the Red Planet. Under the musical direction of Philippe Jordan, Jonas Kaufmann, Bryan Hymel, Bryn Terfel and Sophie Koch were an outstanding vocal cast.